All compositions by Satoshi Takeishi and Hans Tammen. Recorded March 21, 2012 at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center, New York, USA. Recording engineer Paul Howells. Produced and mastered by Satoshi Takeishi and Hans Tammen. Photo by Cinoby/iStockPhoto

Sharawaji is the beauty that occurs with no discernible order or arrangement.

“When atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you could call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would have taken place and no impact of atom on atom would have been created. Thus nature would never have created anything.” (Lucretius)

Satoshi Takeishi and Hans Tammen are creating an unheard world of bizarre textures and polyrhythmic machinations. Dark, sometimes brooding ensemble passages mix and mingle with extended solo cadenzas, creating layers of intensity, at times unsettling, frantic and anti-sentimental. The acoustic sounds are in turn electronically captured, fragmenting and otherwise transforming their percussion and guitar sounds, processed into radically contrastive and fascinating noises emanating from Hans Tammen’s interactive software.

Vito Camaretta / Chain DLK

The somehow enigmatic word “sharawadgi” was firstly introduced by well-known English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple; even if he thought it was Chinese, he used this Japanese word in order to debate about an aesthetical concept, which didn’t really belong to European culture in those days. According to Temple’s own words in his famous essay “Upon The Gardens of Epicurus”, Chineses’ “greatest Reach of Imagination, is employed in contriving Figures, where the Beauty shall be great, and strike the Eye, but without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observ’d. And though we have hardly any Notion of this sort of Beauty, yet they have a particular Word to express it; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of Esteem”. Later the word became almost fashioned – it was widely used to describe Japanese paintings or even kimonos – and nowadays it’s the word that New York-based musicians Satoshi Takeishi – quite known drummer, percussionist and arranger in the improvisational NY scene – and Hans Tammen, who have been played together in a number of formations for a decade, have chosen for this amazing electroacoustic project. Their sound could sound exotic for the followers of the releases by clang, but it makes sense in the explorative aesthaetical path the label is following since its very first release by including seven amazing improvisations that the duo recorded in New York in 2012 by wrapping a bunch of fine and sometimes hiccuping percussive phrases into likewise amazingly bizarre weird entities, which got synthesized by a software for sound processing by Tammen, ranging from lengthwise miniatures such as “Shaman” or “Athetize” and the long lasting exploration “Sateen”, which reaches the intensity of a proper sonic rite.